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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: proportion as they are keen; of any others which are both intense and
lasting we have no experience, and can form no idea. The words or figures
of speech which we use are not consistent with themselves. For are we not
imagining Heaven under the similitude of a church, and Hell as a prison, or
perhaps a madhouse or chamber of horrors? And yet to beings constituted as
we are, the monotony of singing psalms would be as great an infliction as
the pains of hell, and might be even pleasantly interrupted by them. Where
are the actions worthy of rewards greater than those which are conferred on
the greatest benefactors of mankind? And where are the crimes which
according to Plato's merciful reckoning,--more merciful, at any rate, than
the eternal damnation of so-called Christian teachers,--for every ten years
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